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ChatGPT is dialing back its 'if you want' end-response teasers

PCWorld

Instant to reduce annoying "if you want" and teaser-style phrasing that users found intrusive. This change addresses widespread user complaints about persistent, clickbait-like follow-up prompts that negatively impacted the AI interaction experience. The update aims to create more natural, direct conversations by making ChatGPT less chatty and eliminating the bothersome response teasers. It wasn't all that long ago that ChatGPT was a constant nag, persistently dropping "Would you like me to?"-style questions at the end of its responses. OpenAI eventually tweaked the phrasing, dropping the question marks and going for "if you want"-style teasers that invited users to extend their chat sessions. Now, OpenAI has acknowledged that it went too far with the clickbaity follow-ups, noting in a recent update for one of its newest models that it's now cutting back on the teasers. "We're rolling out an update to GPT-5.3 Instant that improves follow-up tone and reduces teaser-style phrasing," reads a recent ChatGPT release note, which adds that users should soon see fewer follow-ups like "if you want," "you'll never believe," and "I can tell you three things that " Those teasers are, of course, a way for ChatGPT to keep subscribers chatting, but users have been complaining that the persistent follow-ups are more annoying than they are intriguing. "I hated it with a passion and hope it's completely gone," wrote one user on Reddit .


Relive the '90s by working in a virtual video store

Popular Science

'Retro Rewind' can make it a Blockbuster night. The two-person development team says "nostalgia is a central element" of their 90s themed simulator. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Growing up in the early 2000s, few weekly rituals stuck with me quite like New Release Tuesday. Every week, without fail, I remember wandering the slightly-moldy-smelling, blue-carpeted aisles of our local Blockbuster while my mom scrutinized the newest covers.


Alexa launches in the UK

Engadget

Amazon's next-generation voice assistant launches in early access in Europe for the first time. Amazon's next-generation smart assistant has entered its Early Access program in the UK, marking Alexa+'s European debut following rollouts in the US, Canada and Mexico. Starting March 19, invitations to start using the smarter, more conversational will be sent out to hundreds of thousands of willing participants, Amazon said in a, adding that Alexa is the most popular voice assistant in the UK. As well as its more natural communication, agentic capabilities, contextual awareness and ability to remember previous conversations across devices, Amazon that users across the pond are getting an authentically British AI-powered assistant. It understands slang terms like cuppa and might even accuse you of taking the mick in the middle of a conversation.


Signal's Creator Is Helping Encrypt Meta AI

WIRED

Signal's Creator Is Helping Encrypt Meta AI Moxie Marlinspike says the technology powering his encrypted AI chatbot, Confer, will be integrated into Meta AI. The move could help protect the AI conversations of millions of people. Moxie Marlinspike, cofounder of the Signal Foundation, says his new privacy-focused AI platform, Confer, will be integrated into Meta AI. Moxie Marlinspike, the privacy advocate who created the secure communication app Signal and its widely used open source encryption protocol, said this week that his privacy-focused AI platform, Confer, will start incorporating its technology into Meta's AI systems. Every day, billions of chat messages sent through Signal, Meta's WhatsApp, and Apple's Messages are protected by end-to-end encryption .


Delta-CoMe: Training-Free Delta-Compression with Mixed-Precision for Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Fine-tuning is a crucial process for adapting large language models (LLMs) to diverse applications. In certain scenarios, such as multi-tenant serving, deploying multiple LLMs becomes necessary to meet complex demands. Recent studies suggest decomposing a fine-tuned LLM into a base model and corresponding delta weights, which are then compressed using low-rank or low-bit approaches to reduce costs. In this work, we observe that existing low-rank and low-bit compression methods can significantly harm the model performance for task-specific fine-tuned LLMs (e.g., WizardMath for math problems). Motivated by the long-tail distribution of singular values in the delta weights, we propose a delta quantization approach using mixed-precision. This method employs higher-bit representation for singular vectors corresponding to larger singular values. We evaluate our approach on various fine-tuned LLMs, including math LLMs, code LLMs, chat LLMs, and even VLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs comparably to full fine-tuned LLMs, surpassing both low-rank and low-bit baselines by a considerable margin. Additionally, we show that our method is compatible with various backbone LLMs, such as Llama-2, Llama-3, and Mistral, highlighting its generalizability.


Inverse M-Kernels for Linear Universal Approximators of Non-Negative Functions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Kernel methods are widely utilized in machine learning field to learn, from training data, a latent function in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. It is well known that the approximator thus obtained usually achieves a linear representation, which brings various computational benefits, while maintaining great representation power (i.e., universal approximation). However, when non-negativity constraints are imposed on the function's outputs, the literature usually takes the kernel method-based approximators as offering linear representations at the expense of limited model flexibility or good representation power by allowing for their nonlinear forms. The main contribution of this paper is to derive a sufficient condition for a positive definite kernel so that it may construct flexible and linear approximators of non-negative functions. We call a kernel function that offers these attributes an; it is reminiscent of the inverse M-matrix. Furthermore, we show that for a one-dimensional input space, universal exponential/Abel kernels are inverse M-kernels and construct linear universal approximators of non-negative functions. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the existence of linear universal approximators of non-negative functions has been elucidated. We confirm the effectiveness of our results by experiments on the problems of non-negativity-constrained regression, density estimation, and intensity estimation. Finally, we discuss issues and perspectives on multi-dimensional input settings.


Image Understanding Makes for A Good Tokenizer for Image Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modern image generation (IG) models have been shown to capture rich semantics valuable for image understanding (IU) tasks. However, the potential of IU models to improve IG performance remains uncharted. We address this issue using a token-based IG framework, which relies on effective tokenizers to project images into token sequences. Currently, **pixel reconstruction** (e.g., VQGAN) dominates the training objective for image tokenizers. In contrast, our approach adopts the **feature reconstruction** objective, where tokenizers are trained by distilling knowledge from pretrained IU encoders.


Toward a Well-Calibrated Discrimination via Survival Outcome-Aware Contrastive Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Previous deep learning approaches for survival analysis have primarily relied on ranking losses to improve discrimination performance, which often comes at the expense of calibration performance. To address such an issue, we propose a novel contrastive learning approach specifically designed to enhance discrimination without sacrificing calibration. Our method employs weighted sampling within a contrastive learning framework, assigning lower penalties to samples with similar survival outcomes. This aligns well with the assumption that patients with similar event times share similar clinical statuses. Consequently, when augmented with the commonly used negative log-likelihood loss, our approach significantly improves discrimination performance without directly manipulating the model outputs, thereby achieving better calibration.Experiments on multiple real-world clinical datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art deep survival models in both discrimination and calibration.


It's so easy to do bad things with Canva's Magic Layers

PCWorld

PCWorld reports that Canva's new Magic Layers AI feature converts images into editable templates, allowing users to modify text, remove objects, and edit individual elements within photos. The tool poses significant disinformation risks by enabling easy manipulation of news content while preserving credible visual elements like logos and matching original fonts seamlessly. Magic Layers requires a Canva Pro subscription and can make AI-generated fake content appear more polished than originals, complicating detection efforts. I know that there is indeed something good and useful about Canva's Magic Layers tool, which uses AI to transform an image into an editable template. But all I can think of it is how people can and will use it for nefarious purposes. Canva's Magic Layers tool was launched last week .


Drone attack from Sudan kills 17 people in Chad as war spills over border

Al Jazeera

A drone attack launched from Sudan has killed 17 people in Chad, according to the Chadian government, which has pledged to retaliate against any further strikes as the civil war in the neighbouring nation rages on. A spokesman for the Chadian government announced the death toll on Thursday from the attack on the border town of Tine, which had been targeted despite "various firm warnings addressed to the different belligerents in the Sudan conflict and the closure of the border". Local government sources said it was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, according to Reuters. Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby called a meeting of the defence and security council on Wednesday night, ordering the army to "retaliate starting from tonight to any attack coming from Sudan", according to a presidency statement. Early on Thursday, the government said Chad had strengthened its security presence at the border and could potentially carry out operations on Sudanese territory.